


The Family Business

by raspberryhunter



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Canonical Character Suicide, Gen, Rarewomen Treat, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 08:47:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva navigates the family politics of Olympus Worlds, Inc. as she investigates a promising developer who may have something very interesting to add to the company's shared-world virtual reality systems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Family Business

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ollipop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ollipop/gifts).



> ollipop -- I, um, started writing you this treat. And then it turned out to be an AU. And then it got a little longer than I was expecting. And I'd forgotten exactly how depressing canon was. Er. I hope you like it anyway?
> 
> Many, _many_ thanks to sprocket for continual poking to level the drafts up and up, mostly on extremely demanding and short notice, and to seekingferret for yet another (big) level.
> 
> Same warnings as for the original (Ovid) story.

Minerva had just cloned one olive tree into twenty with a wave of her hand when the raucous music started, echoing through the entire protobubble. It was Diana, of course, using that irritating bit of code she’d sneaked into Minerva’s private ‘bubble. She knew from experience that if she tried to ignore it, her half-sister’s music would keep playing more and more loudly until she was forced to answer the call. She scowled, watching the reflection of her avatar in the side of the protobubble scowl back at her. She swore under her breath, took a last look at the original olive-tree rendering, with its perfect symmetric leaves, and made the hand gesture to exit the simweb.

The glowing colors of simspace desaturated as she heard around her the indistinct roaring sound Neptune had never been able to entirely eliminate from the hardware. As the noise receded, she took off the sim helmet and rubbed her temples at the inevitable slight headache that followed a long stay in the simweb. She must have been there for longer than she’d thought, engrossed in the details of building her city. Well. This was not so different from Olympus Worlds’ millions of customers, really: the users who wandered simspace to meet new friends’ avatars or virtually interact with old ones, to surround themselves with simulated opulence or something as close to their imagined version of reality as possible. The advent of the immersive sim hardware had taken the avatar-based large online user system from the realm of games to that of the dominant recreational activity for anyone with simnet access.

The vast majority of their customers wanted simply to enjoy the simworlds that made up simspace — the worlds varied from small and simplistic to large and complex. But there were those who wanted to create as well as consume. Minerva was the best of Jove’s children at shaping the simeb, but with all her current responsibilities, she didn’t get as much of a chance to play in simspace as she once had.

She set the sim helmet down on her large black desk, where it clinked lightly against her nameplate. _Minerva Fulgens, Vice-President, Head of Upper-Level Simweb Development._ She smiled, running a finger over the letters. She’d worked so hard to convince her father that she, the child of his bitter first wife, was worthy to be part of the company, to be trusted; that she had the legitimacy to be the twelfth member of the executive team. But all the late nights, all the hard work, had finally paid off.

She took a deep breath and made her way down the hallway to Diana’s office. It was a little bigger, a little more ostentatious with its full-length glass windows and glass desk, though the piles of graphs and charts on the desk rather spoiled the effect. Diana looked up from her six-monitor display. “Finally back in meatspace, eh, Minerva?”

Minerva’s lips quirked. Diana liked to boast about how rarely she went into simspace, declaring that it was for people who couldn’t handle honest work with a keyboard. “We can’t all be lower-level coders, Diana. What’s going on?”

Diana rolled her eyes. “You’ve forgotten about the exec meeting, haven’t you?” 

Minerva swore. “Yeah, I did.” The meetings were never held in simspace, which would have been much easier for her, because of the well-known but rarely-discussed security holes hackers sometimes found. She wasn’t looking forward to it at all, but Minerva wasn’t going to skip out on one of Jove’s meetings, not now that he had really accepted her as one of the company, one of the family. One of them. However, the downside of the company’s executive management team being made up of Jove Fulgens’ brothers and sisters and children -- and most of Jove’s children were half-siblings -- was that at least half of the meetings always consisted of interfamily squabbles. 

Still, family was the important thing. None of the Fulgens family -- the Olympians, as they were colloquially known to the rest of the world -- were willing to cede any of the control of the company to an outsider. They fought constantly, but Minerva knew that they always worked together when anything threatened, such as Prometheus Systems, the creator of the simweb and once their greatest competitor. Prometheus Systems was gone, razed to the ground and its CEO locked away for the rest of his life, and Olympus Worlds was now without a serious rival in the simspace business.

Diana laughed, getting to her feet. “All right, sis, well, you know about the meeting now.” She gestured theatrically for Minerva to precede her out the door, and the two of them started walking along the high-ceilinged glass-and-marble halls of Olympus’ main building. “How’s the strategic plan going? Is the external content provider thing working out for you?”

Minerva had been the one to push the outsourcing of much of the upper-level sim development to anyone outside the company who was interested, with Olympus taking a cut when other simspace users used their products. She shrugged. It was hard to tell, sometimes, whether Diana was trying to help or to probe her for weaknesses. On the other hand, Diana had told her about the exec meeting; that was something. “You’ll hear the latest numbers in the meeting. I think it’s working out very well, personally. There’s quite a community that’s built up among the external developers.”

“As long as you don’t waste too much time doing it yourself,” Diana said, looking amused. “You’re a vice-president now, you know.” Minerva winced at the reminder of her stolen time in the simnet. Diana shook her head. “I don’t know about using people outside the company. I wouldn’t be able to deal with the loss of control, myself.”

Minerva resisted the urge to sigh. Diana was famous within the company for coming down hard on any of the drones in her department whose work didn’t meet her standards; her turnover rate was the highest in the company. “You know everything gets vetted carefully in the dev environment, before the sterile seal is broken on the protobubbles and the work is allowed to get out into the wider simworld. And it’s not a question of control, not exactly. We could eliminate all the ‘bubbles if we wanted, of course. But remember the bad press Prometheus Systems got, that uproar when it recalled the Pandora module? Just think what the PR department would say if I started deleting work right and left.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “Oh, _Venus_. Whatever. As if that girl has ever seen a line of code in her life! If it weren’t for marrying into the family, she’d never have a job here at all, much less head of PR. She has no clue what’s involved in good code —”

As they entered the conference room, the conversation petered out as they quickly took their seats and the meeting began. The first couple of presentations, Minerva had to admit, were quite good. Neptune discussed the coming tactile improvements to the hardware, which would finally allow users to finally feel as if they were touching other things in simspace with their avatars. Diana’s testing results on the Alecto corporate-espionage virus were especially interesting; she showed an animated visualization, glittering above the projection table, of the virus ravaging code. It left unusable dreck in its wake, while using sophisticated algorithms to seek out and find any backup code the instant it was connected to any sort of simnet. “This visualization is logarithmic in showing what code remains; there’s less than a part in a million left in a matter of seconds,” Diana said, flashing a quick smile at the others around the table. 

The meeting went downhill almost immediately after that, however, when Juno and Venus started arguing about an HR fraternization policy which an intern had violated. It came to light, not too far into the discussion, that the intern in question was Venus’ son Aeneas. Jove tried to defuse tensions, but this had just led to his wife and daughter-in-law both turning on him, Juno accusing him of all sorts of affairs that were probably, alas, true. 

“Enough,” Jove roared finally, in a lull where Juno and Venus had temporarily run out of invectives to hurl at one another. “Let’s get on with this meeting. Minerva?”

Minerva started to talk, pulling her 3D-graphs onto the projection table with a wave of her hand and a quick voice-authorization. Jove bent forward to examine the rotating charts. 

“Those trendlines are worrying,” said Apollo. He aimed a virtual-pointer at it, circling the data in question. “The rate of microtransactions for the externally-generated content appears to be leveling off, in a way not conducive to the kind of aggressive business model our family has typically pursued.”

“You can’t expect exponential growth forever —” Minerva started.

“Wasn’t it true,” Diana put in, “that one of the arguments for this model was the —” she made a vague motion that mimicked the gesture used to pull up information in simspace — “the ‘continued renewing of fresh content due to synergistic collaboration effects’?”

“What’s needed, perhaps,” interposed Venus, looking bored, “is more personal guidance from upper management. If Minerva were to, say, oversee some of the protobubble approvals herself, the PR value would more than make up for her time commitment.”

“But—”

Jove waved a dismissive hand. “Diana, you and Apollo follow up on it with Minerva, okay?” he asked, for all the world as if Minerva were a young brat who needed constant supervision.

Minerva grimaced. Diana smirked. “Sure, Dad.”

Later, as they walked out of the meeting, Diana said to her, “Let’s have dinner next week when you’ve had a chance to think through it a bit more. Then we can charge it to the company. Eh, don’t take Dad so seriously, you know how he gets when Stepmom’s been poking at him. We’re family, right?” 

Minerva breathed out. She never knew which face of Diana was the real one, this friendly one or the cold one in the meeting. “Dinner. Sure. Where?”

“How does Ambrosia sound?”

Trust Diana to pick the extremely trendy, extremely expensive restaurants. “Sounds good.”

“A week from today, then. Eight o’clock?”

It was a deadline, Minerva knew. She nodded.

*

As Minerva walked through the airy halls in her simweb protobubble a week later, she heard a chime ring through it. Good, that would be Arachne, the external developer her staff had found for her, the most promising one currently in the system. Arachne’s protobubble had passed all the checks in the previous months, and all the forms had been signed; Minerva’s final lowering of the ‘bubble barrier, so that all of Arachne’s work could spill out into the simworld, would be almost a formality.

She reached up with her hand, saying, “Information on Arachne, written-form, please.” The system responded by providing her with a readout on the wall of the ‘bubble. She peered at it. The reviews from the lower-level managers were all glowing and filled with superlatives, but quite vague. She raised an eyebrow. Something to follow up on later, perhaps.

And here was the stillshot of Arachne’s avatar. It was tagged as an image of her real self in meatspace, a simple rendering based on a webcam, probably meaning that she had no money to buy one of the custom avatars. Minerva’s avatar was also usually her real face and body, but it was because she was one of the Olympians. It was useful for the Olympians’ avatars to be recognizable throughout simspace, and in any case her real-self avatar had distinct advantages over Arachne’s both genetically and monetarily. Arachne wasn’t very old, perhaps in her early twenties, but her face was plain at best and sported a bad case of acne. Her clothes were generic and looked a little too big for her, nothing like Minerva’s hand-tailored suits.

Well, she had let the girl wait long enough. Minerva snapped her fingers, saying, “Let Arachne enter.” A light grew between two pillars, and Arachne walked out of them.

“Welcome, Arachne. I am Minerva Fulgens.” Arachne looked suitably excited and nervous at hearing her name, though of course she must have recognized Minerva’s avatar. “Olympus has been very impressed by your work, and I just wanted to talk to you for a bit before I give the final okay for releasing your work. In the meantime —” she flung out an arm — “this is my protobubble.”

Minerva always enjoyed showing her work to someone for the first time; enjoyed seeing the look of awe on the person’s face. She watched Arachne take in the tall white pillars stretching to the impossibly blue sky, the shining tiles, the grove of olive trees arranged symmetrically off in the distance.

“Well, Arachne,” Minerva said, smiling modestly, “what do you think?”

“It’s very beautiful. You clearly worked very hard on this.”

There was a note of something in the girl’s voice, a quizzical look on her face. It wasn’t quite what Minerva had been expecting. She frowned. “Yes. Well.” She decided to cut short the visit she had planned. “Shall we see your work now?”

Arachne, glancing up at her, seemed to fold in on herself. “Yes, of course,” said Arachne humbly. That was more like it. “But I don’t know how to get there from here —”

Minerva smiled indulgently at the girl. “You don’t have the authority here, in any case, but I can get us there.” Minerva made the appropriate gesture with her hands, saying, “Arachne’s protobubble.”

They appeared in ruins. Towering walls retained the look of a once-vast palace, but the broken masonry was coarse and discolored, almost eaten away, as if by age and wear. Old moldy walls were overgrown with vegetation. There was a general feeling of decay. The direction and quality of the light gave the illusion that it was late in the day, even though no overt source of light was visible.

“You did all this yourself?” The level of verisimilitude was astonishing: the variegated patterns of mold, the wild disorderliness of the overgrown vines, grass sprouting from irregular cracks in the floor tiles. She walked over to a vine to take a closer look; all the leaves were different, with little imperfections that must have taken forever to program in.

“Yes,” said Arachne. The girl was jittery, bouncing on the balls of her feet so much that Minerva almost wondered whether there was something wrong with the rendering of her avatar. “My best friend and I did it all. Well, I did most of it — when she couldn’t, anymore, I kept it on. It’s been my whole life for years. I had to make sure that it was the best work possible.” 

A white bull ambled in. Minerva could have sworn she could discern the individual hairs on the creature’s head. As she watched, the head of the bull subtly changed until it was more human than bull; but the contours of the bull’s head were still present in the lines of the man’s face. Minerva was, despite herself, impressed.

“I do think this is excellent work, Arachne,” Minerva conceded. “I feel pretty confident in telling you that we can break the protobubble seal, at which point all of this will be released into the wider simspace. I’m sure a lot of people will pick it up.”

Arachne said, “I was hoping, Minerva –“ She paused. Her fingers twisted together. “If you could help publicize it, I’d be very grateful –“

“I can,” said Minerva, “although your work will speak for itself; this kind of quality is something that many people will want to incorporate in their world-building.” She hesitated. Arachne’s threadbare avatar – “Are you worried about royalties? I have no doubt that there will be a wide demand for this work. If you need an advance, I’m so confident people will want this that I’m sure we could arrange --“

“Oh, no, no,” Arachne said hastily, “I mean, well, of course royalties would be nice, I could certainly use the cash, but it’s a secondary consideration, I just want the work to be widely known.”

Minerva nodded sagely. She’d come across the type before, the sort who wanted fame over fortune, the kind of coder who was obsessed with having her name known across the simweb. “Ah, so you’ll be wanting a little advertisement. If you have a nice little code snippet — something small, mobile, that people will find interesting, that can be widely disseminated — that’ll do the trick for advertising. And if you make sure to sign your creations, say, a little signature on the leaves here, we can make your work into a brand —”

“Oh no,” Arachne said, “my name doesn’t need to be attached.”

Minerva raised an eyebrow. As she did so, a small spider came ambling into view on a branch. As Minerva watched, fascinated, the spider wove an iridescent web, with a hypnotic pattern that shifted fluidly even as Minerva bent to examine it.

“Well,” Minerva said, gesturing at the spider, “that’s your killer code snippet right there. And I assume it self-propagates?” At Arachne’s nod, Minerva went on, “There you go. Once it’s in the system, it’ll make its way into just about every corner of simspace, until every user has seen one of these little creatures. Now, Olympus won’t pay royalties for this kind of little stowaway, that’s the catch, but for publicizing your work, it’s perfect.”

Arachne smiled. Her face was transformed when she smiled – one forgot that her face was plain, Minerva thought, and remembered only the joy in the smile. “That’s exactly what I want to hear.”

The shimmering spiderweb really was quite fascinating; it invited the eye. Minerva leaned closer, compelled by the moving patterns.

“I don’t know if --”

And the pattern inverted and opened up into a vortex, a dizzying spiral, the noise of a whirlwind surging above her. It felt as if she were falling into the image, but of course it was only an illusion of simspace. It was simply a mirage induced by the coding of the spiderweb, which even as she watched resolved into tiny pictures, of all the Olympians in turn; and the sound of the wind became Arachne’s voice. “ _The Fulgens family has a history of systematic, over-the-top, and in many cases illegal repression of anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Many individuals and families have been torn apart, and for what crime? For getting in the way of the Fulgens family._ ”

Minerva could not look away. A series of still pictures flicked by: Jove with his arm around one woman, then another; Minerva recognized a couple of them as the more famous of his many mistresses. Another picture, an extremely attractive woman Minerva didn’t know, became a progression of pictures of the same woman where the dazzling beauty dimmed, turned to ashes. “ _Jove Fulgens destroyed Antiope Hyria. All she wanted was support for the twins he fathered on her. He took the boys from her and systematically wiped out all her options until she went mad._ ”

A short 2D vid of Diana and Apollo, the twins laughing about something, Diana carelessly flinging back a wave of golden hair over her shoulder; then a beautiful, arrogant-looking woman whose face changed, as Minerva watched, into something haggard and unhappy: “ _Diana and Apollo Fulgens ruined Niobe Tantalus and her company, bringing seven sham patent cases against it and manufacturing evidence against her. Then by means unknown they managed to annihilate all seven modules of Niobe’s code —_ ”

Minerva was so angry she couldn’t say anything. Lies, these were all lies; who was this woman, to spread such vile slanders about her family? Arachne said timidly, “You can either tap on the web or give it voice commands to learn more about any of the —”

Minerva ripped the web from the vine and held it distastefully between two fingers. “Why,” Minerva said, noticing distantly that her voice was surprisingly level and calm, “did you do this?”

“We were as close as sisters, Antiope and I,” Arachne said thickly. “Closer. And now I can’t — she doesn’t even recognize me. I went through a bad time.” Her lips trembled. “And then I thought — this was a way I could make her life mean something --”

Minerva turned finally to look at her. Tears were running down her face. The bull made a small distressed sound; its face, now wholly human, Minerva recognized as Jove’s face.

“It’s all documented,” said Arachne, her voice wobbling. “I did a lot of research, I talked to a lot of people, I found records, papers. It’s all true, there’s nothing in there that’s not totally true. I knew I couldn’t just publish the knowledge, the Olympians would shut me up like they did her. But if I could somehow get it into the sim itself, and the knowledge could spread -- if I could get one of the Olympians on my side – and everyone says you’re the most impartial of the Olympians --“

Minerva stared at the other girl, avatar to avatar. She suddenly realized that the quizzical expression on Arachne’s face in Minerva’s protobubble, the one that she hadn’t been able to decipher, had been _patronizing_.

“No.” She watched Arachne’s face crumble. “You come to me, thinking you’re better than I am, and you expect me to help you mock my family?”

She snapped her fingers: “Remove, recursive-force, top-level authorization, Minerva Fulgens.” 

The leaves started to disappear, one by one. “You’re deleting it all, my whole bubble–“ Arachne cried, unbelieving. The spider quietly faded away. “No, no, you can’t do this —” Her voice rose to a shriek. “This is our work, all that I have left of her, this is my life –“

The shapes started to unravel around them, the ruins silently dissolving into nothingness. “You should have thought of that before you mocked me and my family,” Minerva said coldly.

Everything had disappeared; what had once been the protobubble was now merely a void. “It’s gone.” Arachne dropped to her knees, an expression of blank all-consuming misery on her face. “She’s gone. There’s nothing left.”

Minerva reached out a hand, a bit concerned. “Arachne —”

“Don’t touch me,” Arachne spat. “You’re going to come after me, and after me, just like _he_ did, just like your sister did to Niobe, drive me to madness or jail or something worse —”

Minerva forebore to mention that one could not, technically, touch another person in simspace, at least not until Neptune finished his sensory improvements. “Arachne,” Minerva said, striving to remain reasonable, although she was mostly feeling exasperated, “it’s not like that. We’re not like that. No one’s going to do anything to you.”

“Of course you will,” Arachne whispered. “You and your family. There’s only one path for me now.” She made a tight, tense gesture with her hand, and her avatar winked out of the blank ‘bubble.

The girl was hysterical as well as a liar. And yet — no. No. Minerva would not think about it any more. There was no substance to it. She made the same gesture and exited the simweb.

*

“And Mom’s been on an island kick lately,” Diana said, gesturing in a grandiose way with a forkful of scallops. “I think it started out as an excuse to have tropical vacations, but she’s really doing some interesting things with designing islands and the oceans around them. It’s mostly lower-level architectural coding she does, you know, but you might look at some of her designs, they might give you ideas for upper-level sims —”

“Diana?” interrupted Minerva, picking wanly at the oysters. 

“Mm?” Diana took a dainty bite. 

“Does the name Niobe Tantalus mean anything to you?”

Diana yawned. “The Tantalus woman, sure, didn’t I tell you about her? She was trying to start her own version of the simweb, the silly bitch. A small-scale effort, but still, not something we were going to turn a blind eye to. And then she insulted m’mother into the bargain – insinuated she was a better code-architecture creator. As if! She’s produced more diverse architecture than Mom, sure, but that’s because Mom’s more meticulous.” 

_Mocking my family. Thinking you’re better than I am._ Minerva felt a dreadful disquiet. 

“What happened?” she asked, knowing that Diana wanted her to ask.

“I told Apollo, and he was as angry as I was.” This was not a surprise. Diana and her twin always thought the same about everything. “Between the two of us, we crushed her and her entire family. Apollo went after her with patent infringement – she and her sons won’t be out of litigation for _years_ , they’re already bankrupt. And then she had the gall to denounce us for that in court. She stood up in the witness stand and yelled that we were bullies, that she would come back and show us – “ Diana regarded Minerva intently, then laughed her careless laugh. “Well, you’re family now, so I might as well tell you.” She leaned forward; her voice came out as a whisper. “I sicced Alecto on her.”

Diana sat back with a smile, clearly conscious of having produced an effect. Minerva thought back to the Alecto virus testing results she’d seen at the exec meeting, the rapid code destruction the virus produced. Niobe Tantalus would never recover from that. She had lost everything.

And Diana was very good at what she did. There was no way it would be traced back to her. Niobe would know, of course, from whence her ruin had come, and the Olympians would know, but no one would ever be able to prove a thing.

Diana gave her a pleased grin. Minerva felt sick.

“But enough about me. Have you talked to any developers, like Venus suggested?”

“I have,” Minerva said carefully. “A couple of them. Venus was —” as much as she hated to admit it — “right, it seems. The volume of chat in the external-developer communities has risen by an order of magnitude, correlated very closely with my breaking of their protobubble seals.” She hesitated. “No really impressive work has come out of it, though, so I’m unsure of the long-term effects.”

Diana shrugged. “That’s only to be expected; the great stuff doesn’t come through every day.” At this unexpected lack of judgment, Minerva let out a breath she hadn’t been conscious she was holding. Diana continued, meditatively, “Now Niobe, that woman, she _was_ good, if not as good as she thought she was. It’s too bad she was obnoxious about it. She should have come to work for us. I don’t understand why people insist on crossing us. They must know the consequences, by this time.”

Minerva looked at Diana. She thought about Alecto. She thought about Arachne’s face.

“I have to — I’ll be right back,” Minerva managed to get out, and all but ran to the restroom, where she closed herself in a stall, taking deep breaths. She shivered. She tried not to think of Niobe, or of Arachne, or of Antiope.

When she came out of the stall, Diana was at the sink, critically applying another layer of lipstick. Minerva said nothing to her. She washed her hands and splashed water on her face. Diana gave her reflection a satisfied glance and popped the lipstick back in her purse. 

Minerva looked at the two of them in the mirror. A small catlike smile was playing over Diana’ lips, in contrast to Minerva’s serious look. It was clear that they were related; Minerva’s grey eyes and light hair were a more muted version of Diana’ bright blue eyes and golden tresses, but the cast of their face was the same. They both had their father’s high cheekbones, his strong chin. 

Diana, watching her watching them both, laid her head on Minerva’s shoulder in a rare display of affection. “We’re just the same, you and I,” she said, smiling secretively at the mirror.

Minerva could not repress a shudder.

*

“Compose message for Arachne,” she said, once she was finally alone inside her protobubble.

“User not available,” the pleasant voice answered her. “This user has been permanently canceled.”

There was one thing alone that could trigger the permanent cancellation: if the system had detected a public death notice of the user.

“Oh,” she said. “No, no, no –“ 

But Arachne was such a good developer – she could have figured out how to hack into the computers. Maybe she had faked her death, maybe she had triggered the system with a false death certificate.

She could have.

For a minute, Minerva allowed herself to believe it. But she knew, even before she spoke the words to confirm the pictures of Arachne’s body hanging from the rafters, that it was not the truth.

She told the system to get rid of the picture. It did. 

_This was a way I could make her life mean something --_

She made a gesture with her fingers. “Restore Arachne protobubble from last-known backup, authorization Minerva Fulgens.”

As simply as that, she was back in the ruins. The spiders skittered around Minerva’s feet. One of them paused, watched her warily.

And she spoke again: “Break protobubble seal.” 

The walls of the protobubble vanished. The wide vistas of simspace opened up. Buildings, cities, farmland; mountains, ocean, plains; everything in the world and beyond was simulated out there somewhere.

Spiders came crawling out of the vines, hundreds and thousands of the small grey creatures, as if they had been called. She supposed they were probably programmed to respond to exactly this situation. They flowed past her in the ground and in the air, many borne aloft on gossamer threads, though it was only in her imagination that the silken strands brushed her cheek. With a great rushing sound, a whisper magnified a thousand times into a reverberation like that of the sea, they swept past her where she stood at the boundary between where the bubble had been and the rest of simspace.

And then they were past, leaving her alone. She watched the swarm of spiders scatter until she could not see any of them anymore. Now that the seal was broken, the Olympians would never be able to find them all, not without tearing down all the code of the entire shared-world system.

Tomorrow, she knew with a cold clarity, she would regret what she had just done. She would go back to her life, to her sister, her father, her family; to the board meetings and her vice-president’s desk; and she would try to forget any of this ever happened.

But as she had told Arachne, Arachne’s work would propagate until there was a bit of the code, a spider or two, in every simworld there was. Each spider would take with it the truth, and each shining web it wove would carry Arachne’s message, until the whole world knew it.


End file.
